The Unified Archive feature of Oracle Solaris enables rapid application deployment in the cloud via a new archive format that enables portability between bare-metal systems and virtualized systems. Instant cloning in the cloud enables you to scale out and to reliably deal with disaster recovery emergencies.

Unified Archives in Oracle Solaris 11, combined with capabilities such as Immutable Zones for read-only virtualization and the new Oracle Solaris compliance framework, enable administrators to ensure end-to-end integrity and can significantly reduce the ongoing cost of compliance.

Application-driven software-defined networking. Taking advantage of Oracle Solaris network virtualization capabilities, applications can now drive their own behavior for prioritizing network traffic across the cloud. The Elastic Virtual Switch (EVS) feature of Oracle Solaris provides a single point of control and enables the management of tenant networks through VLANs and VXLANs. The networks are flexibly connected to virtualized environments that are created on the compute nodes.

Single-vendor solution. Oracle is the #1 enterprise vendor offering a full-stack solution that provides the ability to get end-to-end support from a single vendor for database as a service (DaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), saving significant heartache and cost.

Available OpenStack Services

The following OpenStack services are available in Oracle Solaris 11:

Nova. Nova provides the compute capability in a cloud environment, allowing self-service users to be able to create virtual environments from an allocated pool of resources. A driver for Nova has been written to take advantage of Oracle Solaris non-global zones and kernel zones.

Neutron. Neutron manages networking within an OpenStack cloud. Neutron creates and manages virtual networks across multiple physical nodes so that self-service users can create their own subnets that virtual machines (VMs) can connect to and communicate with. Neutron uses a highly extensible plug-in architecture, allowing complex network topologies to be created to support a cloud environment. A driver for Neutron has been written to take advantage of the network virtualization features of Oracle Solaris 11 including the Elastic Virtual Switch that automatically creates the tenant networks across multiple physical nodes.

Cinder. Cinder is responsible for block storage in the cloud. Storage is presented to the guest VMs as virtualized block devices known as Cinder volumes. There are two classes of storage: ephemeral volumes and persistent volumes. Ephemeral volumes exist only for the lifetime of the VM instance, but will persist across reboots of the VM. Once the instance has been deleted, the storage is also deleted. Persistent volumes are typically created separately and attached to an instance. Cinder drivers have been written to take advantage of the ZFS file system, allowing volumes to be created locally on compute nodes or served remotely via iSCSI or Fibre Channel. Additionally, a Cinder driver exists for Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance.

Glance. Glance provides image management services within OpenStack with support for the registration, discovery, and delivery of images that are used to install VMs created by Nova. Glance can use different storage back ends to store these images. The primary image format that Oracle Solaris 11 uses is Unified Archives. Unified Archives can be provisioned across both bare-metal and virtual systems, allowing for complete portability in an OpenStack environment.

Keystone. Keystone is the identity service for OpenStack. It provides a central directory of users—mapped to the OpenStack projects they can access—and an authentication system between the OpenStack services.

Horizon. Horizon is the web-based dashboard that allows administrators to manage compute, network, and storage resources in the data center and allocate those resources to multitenant users. Users can then create and destroy VMs in a self-service capacity, determine the networks on which those VMs communicate, and attach storage volumes to those VMs.

Swift. Swift provides object- and file-based storage in OpenStack. Swift provides redundant and scalable storage, with data replicated across distributed storage clusters. If a storage node fails, Swift will quickly replicate its content to other active nodes. Additional storage nodes can be added to the cluster with full horizontal scale. Oracle Solaris 11 supports Swift being hosted in a ZFS environment.

Ironic. Ironic provides bare-metal provisioning in an OpenStack cloud, as opposed to VMs that are handled by Nova. An Ironic driver has been written to take advantage of the Oracle Solaris Automated Installer, which handles multinode provisioning of Oracle Solaris 11 systems.

Heat. Heat provides application orchestration in the cloud, allowing administrators to describe multitier applications by defining a set of resources through a template. As a result, a self-service user can execute this orchestration and have the appropriate compute, network, and storage deployed in the appropriate order.

Modern Cloud Infrastructure with Oracle Enterprise OpenStack

Oracle Solaris 11 built in virtualization provides a highly efficient and scalable solution that sits at the core of that platform. With the inclusion of Kernel Zones, Oracle Solaris 11 provides a flexible, cost efficient, cloud ready solution perfect for the data center. Enhancements and new features include:

Secure Live Migration and OS version flexibility with Oracle Solaris Kernel Zones

Cloud ready: a core feature of the OpenStack distribution included in Oracle Solaris 11

Rapid adoption with support for Oracle Solaris 10 Zones on Oracle Solaris 11

Integration with the Oracle Solaris 11 Software Defined Networking

Read only security with Immutable Zones

Eliminate downtime with Live Reconfiguration of Zones

Enhanced mobility with Zones on Shared Storage

Simple to deploy and update enabled by tight integration into the Lifecycle Management system